Novice Teachers and Study Strategies

A recent article found inconsistencies in novice teachers' understanding of study strategies.

Highlights

• Researchers found inconsistencies in novice teachers’ understanding of study strategies.

• When asked to make spontaneous study strategy recommendations to students, novice teachers often suggested inefficient strategies. When presented with a list of study strategies, they were generally able to identify the more effective ones.

• To address these inconsistencies, the investigators suggest explicitly teaching pre-service and novice teachers about study strategies as a part of their teacher education and professional development programs.

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One way to help students become better learners is to teach them how to study effectively. If teachers can improve their students’ study strategies, it should positively affect learning outcomes. For Surma et al (2022), this raised an important question: Do teachers themselves know the difference between effective and ineffective study strategies?  This query motivated the research described in the paper, Novice teachers’ knowledge of effective study strategies.

Discussions about study strategies (i.e., how to study) have been around for a while. Thanks to research conducted by Dunlosky et al. (2013), we now know which strategies best support learning (e.g., spaced practice, retrieval practice, interleaved practice, elaborative interrogation). We also know that some other strategies are less effective (such as highlighting and re-reading). Here’s a quick recap of the effective and ineffective study strategies covered in the paper by Surma et al. (2022).

Effective Study Strategies:

1. Distributed/Spaced practice: Splitting up studying across multiple study sessions.

2. Interleaving¹: Testing yourself by intentionally mixing up different, yet related concepts, while studying (see our previous article for an example).

3. Retrieval practice: Retrieval practice is a form of practice testing. It is any strategy in which you try to recall learned content from memory, without having it in front of you.

4. Elaborative interrogation: Asking oneself ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions while studying.

5. Example-based study: Alternating between studying worked-out examples (examples of problems with step-by-step solutions) with solving similar problems on their own.

6. Multi-modal learning: Complementing text-based study materials with explanatory visual information such as graphs, figures, pictures etc.

Ineffective Study Strategies:

1. Re-reading

2. Highlighting/Underlining

3. Cramming (massed practice)

Despite the well-established literature on effective learning techniques, research suggests that students often employ suboptimal study strategies such as re-reading, highlighting/underlining and cramming (Dirkx et al., 2019). Surma et al. (2022) discuss a number of reasons why they do this:

1. Students may gravitate toward some inefficient strategies because they require less effort and give them the illusion that they’re learning: Some study strategies, like re-reading or highlighting, are ineffective because they only require learners to recognize concepts. They don’t challenge students to recall or apply the concepts, which is more difficult to do. Re-reading can thus leave students with the false impression that they have learned the material.

2. Students may engage in some inefficient strategies because of poor planning or a lack of time: Cramming (also known as “massed practice”) is a common approach to studying in which the learner attempts to absorb a large amount of information in a single study session, usually just prior to a test. Cramming is somewhat effective at producing immediate gains in knowledge, but these gains are short-lived. The knowledge is unlikely to be retained for more than a day or two.

3. Students may not know the difference between effective and less effective study strategies: Surma et al. (2022) suggests that many students are never taught how to study effectively. Consequently, they don’t use their study time wisely. “One influential source of such information is the teacher, who could provide students with metacognitive instructions” (Surma et al., 2022).

If teachers could help students develop effective study strategies, the educational impact could be significant. It would provide students with a lifelong skill that they could apply to any subject they choose to study.

Surma et al (2022) recognized that before we can teach students how to study effectively, we have to make sure that teachers themselves can distinguish between effective and ineffective study strategies. Do novice teachers know the difference? Is this knowledge that they already possess? These questions motivated their study.

About the study:

Surma et al. (2022) conducted survey research involving novice teachers² (N= 180) in Flanders., Belgium. Based on earlier research on teachers’ knowledge of study strategies, they hypothesized the following:

• Novice teachers might not be aware of the effectiveness of study strategies such as retrieval practice, spaced practice, interleaved practice.

• Novice teachers’ spontaneous study advice to students might include less effective study strategies.

They administered a pen and pencil survey to newly certified teachers. The survey included three parts.

1. Part 1 - Open-ended questions: Two open-ended questions were placed in the beginning of the survey to see what kind of study advice novice teachers spontaneously suggest to their students. Placing these questions at the beginning prevented them from being primed by part 3 of the survey, where a list of study strategies was presented³. Question 1 asked the teachers to provide three study strategy recommendations for students preparing for a near-term test. Question 2 asked teachers to provide one study strategy recommendation for students preparing for a test in 3 weeks in advance.

2. Part 2 - Learning scenarios: The teachers were provided with seven scenarios, each describing two students using two different study strategies. One strategy is empirically validated as being effective, while the other one is less effective. For each scenario, participants were asked to choose which strategy would most benefit long-term learning.

3. Part 3 - Study strategy list: A list of 22 study strategies was presented and the participants were asked to rate their effectiveness on a 5-point Likert scale.

Findings:

• The teachers did relatively poorly with the open-ended questions in Part 1. Highlighting was suggested by 33% (59 teachers), cramming by 21% (38 teachers) and re-reading by 17% (30 teachers). Less than half (45%) suggested taking a practice test (i.e., Retrieval Practice). When asked to make spontaneous recommendations, they often recommended the less effective study strategies.

• The teachers did better with the Learning Scenarios in Part 2 and the study strategy list in Part 3. When participants were asked to choose between two different study strategies, they most frequently chose the study strategy that research has found to be more effective. For example, in the scenario comparing testing (i.e., retrieval practice) to re-reading, they selected testing.

• Teachers often had incomplete knowledge about strategies. Despite the generally positive results in Parts 2 and 3, respondents sometimes suggested strategies that have been shown not to work, while avoiding strategies that do work. For example, the vast majority of novice teachers failed to recommend interleaving as an effective strategy.

What’s our take-away?

This study highlights the inconsistencies in novice teachers’ understanding of study strategies. While they were often able to pick the effective ones when comparing or rating, they were not able to spontaneously make appropriate recommendations. According to Surma et al. (2022), these discrepancies may suggest that novice teachers do not yet exhibit a coherent image of the learners’ cognitive architecture. It may also suggest a gap that exists between educational research and practice.

Surma et al. (2022) recommend explicit strategy instruction in teacher education as a tangible solution to address these inconsistencies in novice teachers’ understanding. If the teachers understand learning strategies well, then they can make appropriate recommendations (with necessary explanation) to their students, who are otherwise likely to gravitate toward sub-optimal learning strategies.

References:

• Dirkx, K. J. H., Camp, G., Kester, L., & Kirschner, P. A. (2019). Do secondary school students make use of effective study strategies when they study on their own? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(5), 952–957. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3584

• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). What works, what doesn’t. Scientific American Mind, Sep-Oct, 47–53.

• Surma, T., Camp, G., de Groot, R., & Kirschner, P. A. (2022). Novice teachers’ knowledge of effective study strategies. Frontiers in Education, 7. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.996039

1. Check out this microlesson on interleaving

2. The participants had just completed an introductory course for novice teachers in secondary education, organized in two provinces in Flanders, Belgium from 19 Flemish teacher education institutions.

3. Respondents were restricted from viewing the remaining parts of the survey and could not return to earlier answered questions to limit prior questions influencing subsequent answers.